Sitting here and listening to a presentation on Adaptive Blue, a FireFox plugin that allows you to interact with content and shows what other friends have interacted with the same content. They deal with privacy by allowing for approval, and you can get rid of individual records you don’t want to be seen.

10gen and AlleyCorp - Kevin Ryan talks about his development enviornment, seems to have everything you need and is connected to the cloud. There’s nothing all that revolutionary here, but the single enviornment along with the cloud makes it interesting. Intact, Silicon Valley Insider runs on 10gen. Your getting relief from System Admin and Platform Gotchas.

Will at Cookstr - got interested in The Long Tail - publishing Cookbook Authors who would be shut out of the web, for various reason.

You can search on recipes by various criteria. Pretty much, this is a portal for recipes, and you can save your own recipes, etc; Social Networking part needs to be added, later.

Wee Web - for new parents, grandparents. Can’t say I’m into this website, service.

CO-OP is good app to share what you and your coworkers are doing. This product is good for teamwork, same people behind Harvest. Www.Coopapp.com.

The program attempts to showcpeople what everyone is working on now. It is a way to bond with your coworkers.

The program is good for showing what we’ve done, too.

Mixed Ink - allows groups to brains to brainstorm and create a joint document.

The documents are rated and updated in real time. Some great ideas here. This software was used for The Netropts Healthcare Plank that was covered in Wired recently.

Habitat Map - online tools to support community mapping, visualing what happens after you flush your toilot, for example, for example, you can find out where your trash is likely to go. Ha.

Good for overlaying maps, etc. Crowdsource knowledge

Good Presentations tonight. Going to the the TechSet party after this.

What about the future of the New York Tech Meetup?

An announcement is being made here, today. Over the 4 years the meetup has had several locations, with more and more and tech meetups.

7500+ members and more and more events. So much more is possible and to realize our potential, so the leader is stepping down.

A new board of directors and an elected organizer seeks to create a new organization that could, eventuallylaunch startups.

Build microsites based on Social Network profiles.

Michael: Use the Internet as the 4th branch of governent to monitor the vote.

The Uptake site.

Obama let 25,000 tshirt designs, he gave some info but let people build on it. “I am you”.

Green Color Economy, invest in Green Economy, create 5 million jobs.

Social Media Campaign Process
Determine objectives and find right channels, segments. Then Metrics are developed.

- webmasters, blog owners, social network admins, etc.

Shorebank case study - members of the bank that are content creators who were “enabled” to use Social Media more effectively. Created Electronic Press Kit, much more than a PDF file.

Essentially, the Brand needs to “create” and “enable” Social Media content that allows users to create User Generated Content that’s viral to sell a specific event.

Case Study of Bamboo by Wacom got AD:Tech award.

David: quit Yahoo! 8 months ago because he was tired of talking impressions and clicks; decided to go to ExpoTV and create new set of metrics.

The Consumer Voice Goes Beyond Technology. We have 280,000 videos that we never asked for. There are videos for anything that is available nationally.

ExpoTV: 85% of the videos skew positive while 15% are negative or nuteral; we don’t look at videos for sentiment but we do check them for profanity or syncing issues. We copensate for every video they upload ($2.00 - $5.00 per video).

Built unbiased profile of users Brands can use.

BlogHer is presenting at this session.

Blogging a daily part of life, blogs are mainstream. BloHer - people are spending less time watching TV and reading blogs, instead.

Definstion of a Blogger is changing and Social Media has fundamentally changed the way we communicate.

Why are people “there”? Social Media, which used to be just a set of tools, now have changed how we communicate.

Also, most people in the Blogosphere consider their online friends as real friends. Many BlogHer bloggers blog for their children, to record the story.

If you look at most bloggers that are successful they are “driven” and they feel need to say what they are saying regardless of what they are paid, or not, and they’d write anyway; Heather Gold added, that is why people are interested ( Boing Boing, TechCrunch, Beth Kantor - who I recent met at Emetrics Summit DC ).

The Power to be Heard; The Evolution of Community. We still trust People.

How can you be TrustWorthy?

How you can represent youself as a person and still represent your Brand.

Fleishman Hillard - Blog Relations Case Studies

- Tamiflu case study - a blogger who was also a contending for American Idol, came down with the Flu and was offered TamiFlu and blogged about it. Target person who already had the flu.

- David Beckham RAZR2 Campaign - you need to offer not just the blogger, material, but their readers, too, so they can particapate and voice their opinions.

- Purdue Perfect Portions case study. 1.5 million consumer impressions, 59% of interested bloggers requested coupons, 50% wrote positive reviews. One blogger produced 2 videosinvolving cooking Perfect Portions with 2000 views on YouTube.

My Takeaways - this is another good session suggesting you need to think about bloggers readers, indentifying influential bloggers for a subject first, but thinking about the end goal, all the while.

What criteria do you use to identify influntials?

I came up with an idea of a method by which you identify a community where the blogger is in, then do additional research to find out how influential a blogger/blog are in that community (that might require offline data).

Fleishman Hillard uses Collective Intellect, Radian6, one other tool I can’t recall the name of, and a inhouse tool that rates a keyword against it’s use in an online community.

While writing this post, my thoughts go back to Radian6. I got an email on Sunday, that was very untransparent, not well explained, offering to cleanup free accounts, including mine. No reason or advanced warning was given, though one could guess, the reasons might be tied to new partnerships Radian6 just entered into, which might suggest they no longer wanted or needed blogger feedback …. But they did not explain any if that (the real story, in my opinion).

So, until this week, I had access to Radian6, and while it was a good product, Radian6 didn’t really provide data to me in structured way that could be most useful to a Web Anslyst.

Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the 6 months, I had use of it.

Yet, one thing does bother me about the Radian6 “cleanup” of accounts, and to me, it’s somewhat representative of many Social Media firms, who, while they claim to provide excellent tools, including Radian6, still don’t communicate well, openly, honestly and are not as transparent.

In the case of my “account” and their “cleanup”, Radian6 didn’t explain why they were doing it, if it applied to all of the free trials they set up, or just some of them, or what the criteria was, in order to make those choices. That bothers me.

It means, as far as I can tell, Radian6 failed to practice openness, that they designed their tool to “monitor”.

I’m my case, Radian6 allowed me to use their platform to monitor other people’s conversation, but did not
have time or organizational will, to have a conversation, with me. I see that as an unfortunate oversight, a mistake.

Compete.com made a similar mistake, several months ago, but once they realized it, quickly changed course.

Compete engaged in conversation, and, they listened.

Providers of the new social media platforms and tools, sometimes they fall into talking the talk, without “walking the walk”, they are not transparent about motivations or communications (with Bloggers?). Compete got it right, so far, Radian6, didn’t.

But in Social Media, should not a Social Media platform provider be good communicators too?

It appears not to be the case, all too often, but then, you could say the same thing about Web Analytics providers, and even the WAA, whose Board, I sit on.

And, Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Perhaps the old saying “the first will be last and the last, will be first” applies here, too.

I believe, we (and I include myself here, as a WAA member) who provide the “tools”, who embody “the way”, we need to also practice openness, transparancy AND, in the case of Web Analytics, the ability to “measure” and provide “insight”, that our audiences have the right to expect of us and hold us accountable for.

Enough said, missing the next session while expressing myself on this one.

I’m at the Tribecca Grand Hotel today at the Marketing & Online Communications conference.

Designing for Conversation 9AM - 10:10 am

Heather Gold - she’s happy about Barack Obama, he knows a lot about having conversations and still holding your own opinions; also, she’s gay and due to the close vote in California,if she’s still married.

Also, Howard Greenstein who I know from Social Media Club, is speaking, as well. Started the WAC group in 1994, Howard is a veteran of the beginnings of Social Media on the Web.

Organizing online communities is more than just using the Internet as a Black Box (saying, “my friends”)(cited Hillary Clinton as using social media but killing the conversation).

What Obama did wasn’t so different than what we do in our daily lives. Ann went to spend her election eve party with her Black friends, because of what it means to Africian Americans.

Many watering holes and different connversations around each one.

In fact, the container for a conversation(s) is a person, you need a human face to an organization.

Ann Ferdleson has her own company, sees marketing as about relationships. The topic moved to Twitter, she said she used Twitter to keep her family updated.

Twitter limits you to 140 characters, nut does not really tell you much about feedback fully, but is a step in the right direction.

Mary Lou Floyd - from BT. Figure out what people care about, first. But, there was no management and hosting of the conversation.

Obama’s Campaign was amazing as a marketing. He allowed people to communicate back through multiple channels.

My Takesways from this session are that building online communities involves multiple conversations around different “watering holes” about what people care about, and allowing for response along multiple channels.

While viewing the NYC Marathon in Williamsburg, yesterday, and listening to Nikki Shannon and her band play, while waves of runners past, I had a glimpse of an idea, not sure if this has been done yet, but parts of it already exist.

To begin, many artists, of all types, have lousy websites that aren’t found easily in search engines. Even worse, manyof those same sites have lousy usability issues, and, there’s little if any web analytics tracking.

There are a few web services such as Pandora, Genius from Apple, I believe, iLike; these services a built to figure out music you like, play more if it, and hope you buy some of it.

Also, services like Upcoming, Yelp, to some extent Facebook, MySpace and other Social networks connecting events and friends. Social Networks like Going.com and Meetup.com want to figure out what you like and match you up with a group or event, Going is more focused on event promoters than on you while Meetup is becoming annoying in it’s attempts to sell me on every new meetup that meets what it thinks I’m interested in.

But what connects up a group like Nikki Shannon, who a friend of mine said sounded to her like Sheryl Crow, and a Pandora preference for that kind of music?

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see anything that does that.

So, let’s say that I have Pandora (if it doesn’t go out of business, first), it knows what I like, knows where I live or am at the moment, knows what I am prepared to pay, has clips of the artists and information about the venue.

Most of this stuff exists, but it lives all over the web, not in one service, and even if it did, not well.

My point is, in this era of economic contraction, innovation may come not so much, from inventing new things, as much as making what we already have done, work well ….. Connecting the Dots.